Flashback

Flashback, alternatively titled The Education of Fredrick Fitzell, is a 2020 Canadian mystery thriller film written and directed by Christopher MacBride. The film stars Dylan O'Brien, Hannah Gross and Maika Monroe. The film premiered at the 2020 Sitges Film Festival. Plot Fred Fitzell and his wife Karen visit Fred's mother in a hospital where she is suffering from severe mental decline. Fred works in an office job but begins to get vivid flashbacks of high school. He remembers a girl named Cindy Williams and visits the high school and asks a librarian about her. The librarian tells Fred that Cindy went missing after a drug went around the school. Fred gets more flashbacks and is accosted by a scarred homeless person in his car while he is parked in an alley. Fred begins to have memories of a child who walked past him in high school who looks like the homeless person. Fred has disparate memories of the child and the homeless person in which they say a single word; when Fred pieces these words together, they combine to say "I'm/in/your/lobby." Fred visits his apartment lobby with a baseball bat and is surprised by the homeless person. Fred sees various visions of a mouth and of being on the floor looked at by Cindy and others. He awakens after having had a mental breakdown in the lobby. Fred reconnects with his friends from high school and continues to have more flashbacks. He has memories of doing a drug called mercury (or merc) in his high school's boiler room and of visiting a club to get "uncut merc". Near the club, Fred and Cindy talk on a roof about how the drug releases people from being trapped. In the present, Fred is having difficulty at work and needs to deliver a presentation. With his high school friends, he visits the now-abandoned club in an attempt to find out what happened. At the club, Fred begins to have flashbacks of taking uncut merc in high school. He finds homeless squatters, including the scarred man from earlier, and he finds Cindy. They tell him he never left. Fred flashes back between the homeless person and the child, who back in high school took high amounts of merc. He also sees visions of the mouth and people looking over him.